I'm editing a simple table. I would like to have it nicely formatted. While I could use tbl, latex, or similar, this seems overkill — plain text really is sufficient. As it's simple I might as well have the source be the output. So the source should look good too. This seems like it should be a perfect job for column -s '|' -t — it finds the separators and automatically inserts spaces to align according to the maximum width in each column. Unfortunately, it deletes the separators, so I can't rerun it after further editing. Is there any good text-processing tool that can do this idempotently, so that it's output serves as input? Or do I need to write my own?
EDIT: here's an example of what I want:
foo | bar | baz
abc def | 12 | 23456
should become
foo | bar | baz
abc def | 12 | 3456
When ' ' is both the separator and the spacer, column -t works nicely. But my items have spaces in them, so I can't use that.
Having the spacers be distinct from the separators complicates things. I think it's useful to have them be treated as separator characters when next to separators, but that's not what column -s '|' -t does (though obviously the current behavior is also useful).
Best Answer
Not sure if I understand right what is your problem. But, can it be solved adding an additional temporal separator? hence you can use the second separator to mark the separations, keeping the original separator untouched.
See this example where I add a "@" to each of the "|" so the input of the column command would be "xxx @| yyyy". Column will process the "@" keeping the "|" untouched: